of note: "Therefore arrays of equidistant electrodes have been developed for superficial and depth recording. During the last decade the construction of many of these multiple electrodes for in vivo and in vitro measurements is based o n thin film techniques (Wise a n d Angell, 1975; Pickard, 1979; Pochay et al., 1979; Prohaska et al., 1979; Kuperstein and Whittington, 1981).

Just got back from a trek through the volcanic mountains of Iceland. The landscape is extremely dramatic; though it’s not nearly the scale of Alaska or the Rockies, it presents itself as such, as the largest plant is thick moss or stubble grass (in places); everything is bare, the vistas unobstructed. (What do you do if you get lost in an Icelandic forest? Stand up.). There are no trees for size reference, indeed it seemed so alien for a bit that I was amazed that I could still breathe the air.

The first day of exploring I had a pretty serious scare. Was walking, very light and fast as usual, with just enough to protect against rain, just enough food to keep me from eating moss. I elected to take the less-popular route back, which lead across a high muddy (no plants) gray (all the snow is ashen) scree-filled plain, to a hunchback of a mountain, and down into the river valley where I was camped. The first part was fine, though searingly desolate and wind-shorn. The problem came when I rounded the final peak and discovered that the trail was covered by a gray wind-sculpted snowmass. It was at an angle too steep for my shit shoes and lack of ice-tools, and the slopes everywhere else were critical: free a rock and it will tumble 100‘. Free a Tim and he will also tumble 100 feet .. or more. I didn’t want to hike the 17km back the way I came without an attempt at re-finding the trail, so I set off, gingerly, over the ice and gravel, alone.

The ash actually saved me, as it coated the snowfields, and made them passable in the late late afternoon warmth (the sun ‘sets’ around midnight and rises at 2.). This lead to a pinnacle from which I could *see* the campsite! But there was only slide-to-death venues for descent, until I noticed a set of footprints heading up a steep snowbank to my left. I was elated - a trace of humanity! I set off with renewed vigor, and did a semi-controlled fall down the ice; the foot-holes kept me under control.

But they were not foot holes. I noticed quickly that the holes were irregular in spacing and shape, and shortly after I passed the steepest wind sculpted section of snowbank, realized that they were made by a large rock falling off the mountain, picking up speed as it dented the ice shell. I kept going, mostly because I could not stop, though eventually it leveled off. Had that rock not fallen, I don’t think I would have had the psychological wherewithal to try the slope, nevermind foot purchase to slow my descent.

As a stream gets broader its slope generally decreases, given constant resistance from the rock / earth, so as I descended the valleys broadened and became less treacherous. I made the remainder of the way back on a riverbed, albeit with wet feet. It was exciting, and i felt fully in the world as i was trying to get off that trail-less mountain, but I’m not sure if I want to do it again; the following day while hiking up neighboring peaks I felt a heightened sense of caution, vertigo.

quote (I cannot say this any better!): "People make systematic errors when attempting to predict their affective reactions to future events, and these errors have social (1–3), economic (4–8), legal (9, 10), and medical (11–22) consequences. For example, people have been shown to overestimate how unhappy they will be after receiving bad test results (23), becoming disabled (14, 19–21), or being denied a promotion (24), and to overestimate how happy they will be after winning a prize (6), initiating a romantic relationship (24), or taking revenge against those who have harmed them (3). Research suggests that the main reason people mispredict their affective reactions to future events is that they imagine those events inaccurately (25). For example, people tend to imagine the essential features of future events but not the incidental features (26–28), the early moments of future events but not the later moments (17, 24), and so on. When mental simulations of events are inaccurate, the affective forecasts that are based on them tend to be inaccurate as well."

solution, ala François de La Rochefoucauld: "Before we set our hearts too much upon anything," he wrote, "let us first examine how happy those are who already possess it"

this is surrogation ; it relies not on mental simulation, hence is immune to the associated systematic errors.

problem is that people differ. paper agues that, in fact, they don't all that much - the valuations & affective reactions are produced by evolutionarily ancient physiological mechanisms. Furthermore, people's neighbors, friends, and peers are likely to all be similar in personality and preference via self-selection and social reinforcement - hence their reactions to a situation will be similar.

They used a speed-dating scenario in their experiments, from which they observe: "Women made more accurate predictions about how much they would enjoy a date with a man when they knew how much another woman in their social network enjoyed dating the man than when they read the man's personal profile and saw his photograph."

Next, they employ personality-evaluation "Men and women made more accurate predictions about how they would feel after being evaluated by a peer when they knew how another person in their social network had felt after being evaluated than when they previewed the evaluation itself."

Conclusion: "But given people's mistaken beliefs about the relative ineffectiveness of surrogation and their misplaced confidence in the accuracy of their own mental simulations (39), it seems likely that in everyday life, La Rochefoucauld's advice—like the advice of good neighbors—is more often than not ignored.

Editorializing: I'm not quite convinced that 'neighborly advice' is an accurate predictor of our absolute reaction to a situation as much as it socially informs us of reaction we are *supposed* to have. Society by consensus - that's what some of my European friends dislike about (some parts of) American culture. They need to run some controls in other cultures (?)

I agree! I also agree that if (computer) geeks would make a more user-friendly linux with better open office, we would all switch to linux. But for now we'll have to stick with the retarded windows :( -- ana/poison

Radio spectrum, the oil of the 21st century. yep. except the equipment needed to access it is rather cheap, and owned by almost everybody. Licensing structure needs to change. The article says that WiMax is likely to sit around 2.6ghz. 3.5ghz, used for WiMAx in some other countries, is reserved for military use in the Untied States

Adobe acrobat reader 7.0 leaks a prodigious amount of memory on my linux system (Debian Etch, stable). However, some pdfs will only open in acroread, so i want to keep the application around for occasional use. Because of the memory leaks, it is not good to have it loaded by default by iceweasel / firefox (evince or xpdf is better). To do this:

quit your browser (not sure if this is necessary, but perhaps it is a good idea).

open /etc/mozpluggerrc and comment out (#) all the sections that reference acroread. There are 3 macro lines, as well as one line in in the pdf / x-pdf content handling list.

goto ~/.mozilla and remove pluginreg.dat ; do the same for ~/.mozilla/firefox

go to /usr/lib/iceweasel/plugins and move / remove / rename nppdf.so (if it is there) (this is what tripped me up for a while - i had to look at the automatically-generated pluginreg.dat to figure out that acroread was being loaded without mozplugger via this plugin).

What I have learned about licensing & Duke (or really, licensing at universities in general), in no particular order:

Licensing fees split up: 50% to the inventors, 10% to the lab, 10% to the department, 30% to the dean

The 50% inventors' fees are split up based on what is determined fair by the inventors themselves, or if that fails, by the Office of Licensing & Ventures (OLV) itself. If there are several patents in a licensing, then it is split between patents based on relevance / contribution, then between each of the inventors. Royalties are split in the same way.

The OLV & patent's budget is indirectly paid through these licensing fees.

Universities are granted ownership of any intellectual property developed by graduate students & other employees under federal funding through the 1980/1984 Bayh-Dole Act. Universities assume ownership of IP developed through privately funded work, though there is no one law for this.

Graduate students are considered employees under the law, hence IP retained, even if no formal contract was signed.

Even if an independent inventor (e.g. me) files a invention disclosure form to Duke in good faith, and upon investigation the OLV agrees that the claim of independence is supported, this does not prevent future litigation.

If the fields of invention and research overlap, as is probably true for me, then OLV & Duke are likely to protest (money is at stake, after all).

Patents require a servicing fee every 3-5 years - have to learn more about this!

Almost certainly want a patent on a device. without it, it is very easy to steal :/

Can patent software 'ideas' or 'methods' that have utility, but not the actual software. The text of the software is copyrighted, like a book.

If a patent has people on it who were not involved in the invention, the patent can be legally contested and voided. Conversely, if the patent does not have all the inventors on it, then it can also be contested by an outside party, and voided.

Duke will pay the legal fees for patents & writing up a licensing contract

Duke will also pay the fees to patent in other countries (where the patenting fees are much higher), depending on market.

The European Union has no centralized patent office - patents must be filed in each country and translated to & from the official language. The legal and translation fees & time spent on this can be very high, so usually companies only file in a few largest markets, if at all.

Concerning the named inventors on a patent, above, Duke determines who is involved usually by asking the PI, without delving into the internal politics of a lab. This may or may not be an issue.

Typical licensing fees $25k - $1M, depending on what is being patented.

Duke can revoke the licensing agreement if the company is not using it / making progress within a period specified by the licensing contract, e.g. 6 - 9 months.

Duke typically licenses multiple patents at a time to startups; startups typically need more than one patent.

In some fields, device licensing is exclusive to a field - e.g. one company licenses for Parkinson's application, another for Alzheimer's, etc.

Once a patent is licensed to a company, it typically becomes gradually 'diluted' as the company & employees invests more in the idea/technology. If the initial royalty level was 5%, and the company makes significant changes & improvements, then the company will re-negotiate the royalty percentage.

Oftent the licensing agreement specifies the maximum amount of dilution / the minimum royalty level, as ultimately the university was involved in the first step to commercialization, without which anything else could have happened.

Similarly, if the company licensing University IP needs to give a certain royalty percentage to another patent holder & cannot remain solvent without decreasing University share, then the company and University will negotiate a lower royalty rate.

conclusions:

Everything is fluid & up for negotiation, depending on the desires and situations of each of the parties.

Typically, the university and inventor are on the same side, but that is not true for me.